Alan Sallabank | 8dB Sound

Halo Upmix Saves The Day

Article first appeared in Pro Tools Expert

Here’s the scenario – yesterday I was asked to make a 5.1 mix for DCP for a charity, to be shown at a kids film festival.

The first section had been properly prepared in ProTools, and so it was a breeze to make into a nice sounding 5.1 mix. I used Nugen Halo on the supplied stereo music, which gave a lovely 5.1 upmix, There were also a number of movie clips featured, which were thankfully supplied as LtRt (Dolby ProLogic encoded), that Halo more than capably decoded to 5.1.

The second section was a spot that had been “mixed” in the picture edit suite, and contained issues like the boom and clip mics being panned hard left and right and mixing the result in with stereo music, The consequences of all this meant that suddenly I had dialogue wrapping around the rears when I tried to upmix it.

We could have gone back to the original sound edit, but there wasn’t the time or money to do that – it’s for a charity after all. Just playing it as straight stereo wasn't an option as that also produced nasty results at these points.

Nugen Audio Halo Upmix Saved The Day

This is where Nugen Halo’s incredibly intuitive controls really came into their own. I was able to completely control the amount of wrap around and centre divergence under automation, and so we were able to deliver a very passable result!

By being able to ride these parameters in such an intuitive fashion, with the display giving me reassuring visual feedback, Nugen Halo gives unprecedented levels of control in my opinion. Nothing else on the market is as intuitive, easy to understand, and folddown safe.